The path to marketable Level 4 or 5 autonomy still looks quite long; humans will be hands-on-the-wheel and eyes-on-the-road for at least a few more years. But that doesn't mean that a lot of experimentation isn't underway. Some of it is futuristic, but some of its has been, well ... sort of odd.

The mysterious "seat suit" guy in the Washington, DC area.

Weird! The truth was that Virginia Tech and Ford had teamed up to test how signals could be used to develop a common international language for autonomous vehicles to show their intentions to pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers.

So a researcher took the wheel of a Ford Transit Connect while wearing a seat suit. This attracted a lot of confused attention, but it also meant that Ford and Virginia Tech could collect data without using a self-driving car.

Apple's amateur-looking self-driving technology.

California DMV

Apple was rumored for over a year to be working on "Project Titan" — a presumably all-electric Apple Car that would drive itself and revolutionize transportation just as the Cupertino giant transformed music with the iPod and communications with the iPhone.

The project fell apart and was reorganized around software rather than an actual car. But evidence about what Apple was up to had trickled out. There was a van rigged up with some sort of self-driving or mapping tech, for example.

And the Domino's self-driving pizza-delivery robot.

Uber's self-driving exile from San Francisco.

Uber

It was the self-driving equivalent of a perp-walk: after flouting California DMV rules and putting self-driving Volvos on the streets of the Bay Area before they were properly permitted, Uber had to put the fleet on flatbeds and high-tail it to Arizona.